Introverts and Bees 🐝

Happy Friday!

Weird title, I know. This Friday, I wanted to write about two short things: one has to do with being an introvert, and the other has to do with bees.

I was on the The Introverted Leader Podcast! The podcast is all about how we, as introverts, handle the struggles of leadership. On this particular episode, we talked a bit about some of my peculiarities, like how I'm not afraid of public speaking but am still an introvert, and how I have to balance that. I also talk a lot about how I navigate environments and build relationship maps to influence the right people when relationships are uncomfortable for me.

Oh, Greg, the podcast host, and I built an AI skill to help you with that last bit. Let me know what you think (it's in the link above).

Beekeeping is, for the most part, seasonal. From March until around November, beekeepers have active work with their bees, and then during the colder winter months, we have to wait and see if the bees make it.

One way to look at it is that the work you do this season buys you the next one. If you bring weak hives into winter, they might not survive, and if they do, they might have a slow and rough start the next season.

Beekeepers feel that clock ticking and the pressure of every week to make the right choices so we can have a good next year and our bees survive and stay healthy.

Here's the thing: our bees don't care about what we want. They do their own thing. We have to work alongside them. So while this means we may have goals that span a year or more, the only way we have to get there is through small, frequent inspect-and-adapt cycles.

We go out every 7-10 days and open our hives, and we don't know what we'll see. A hive that was healthy the week before might be missing a queen the next, or attempt to swarm. We have to keep checking because things change all the time, and so our plans have to account for that.

I gave a talk for our local beekeeping club this week and talked about how the more hives you get, the more you have to evolve as a beekeeper and become more flexible. You start having to accept that when you go into the bee yard with more hives, there will be more surprises. You move from relying on your weekly plan to realizing your first job is to deal with whatever the situation is.

I bring this up because the tech industry talks around topics like this, but still mostly believes it can set plans that will survive months or years, and that the world will only change in the ways it desires. If these companies were beekeepers, their hives would die every winter because they only thought about the work ahead, not the evidence available every 7-10 days to change course.

As AI makes delivery much faster, this lesson will matter more than ever. It is a bit like a beekeeper thinking that after having one or two hives, they can now have 100. For reference, this happens more than you think in the beekeeping world, and after 2-3 years and a massive bank loan, they list everything for sale and close shop. Success in beekeeping requires inspecting and adapting, not just more activity. The same is true in tech.

Sincerely,

Ryan